In the Darkness of the Sea Review

In the Darkness of the Sea is a short, free narrative game where you play a child sailing a boat on a dark, stormy night. I’ve always been fascinated by the sea at night, the silent terror of waves coming as if from nowhere, the endless depths, the horrifying thought of what would happen if one were to wander too far and be unable to get back to shore. …Darkness of the Sea seemed bursting with potential, the sort of compact experience that would leave me wondering about its meaning for days.

Sadly, as is often the case, this potential was just the lack of doing anything. The game is beautiful, and there’s actually more to its mechanics than meets the eye, but it lacks in what should’ve been its central draw: namely, its narrative.

Clearly the game is aiming to be abstract, and anyone familiar with world events of the past couple of years should have a pretty good guess what it’s driving at. But abstract art is the lack of form, not of content, and here I mean ‘content’ not in the sense of AAA excess but of actual meaning. In this sense, In the Darkness of the Sea, even though it only lasts ten-minutes, has trouble justifying its running time.

Score: 40/100

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